In a Jan. 23 letter to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, three Conservative MPs — Maurice Vellacott, Leon Benoit and Wladyslaw Lizon — report “the possibility of numerous breaches of the Criminal Code — to be specific, homicide — in Canada which need to be investigated. These killings appear to have started out as attempted abortions but the babies were born alive.”

Citing Statistics Canada data published on a blog called Run With Life, the letter repeats the blog’s claim that, “From 2000 to 2009 in Canada, there were 491 abortions of 20 weeks gestation and greater, that resulted in live births [a national rate of about one per week]. This means that the aborted child died after it was born. These abortions are coded [with a Most Responsible Diagnosis (MRDx) designation] of P96.4, or ‘Termination of pregnancy, affecting fetus and newborn.’”

Putting aside loaded terms such as “homicide,” the letter writers are correct when they say that some late-term abortions truly do involve live births. A Sept. 2012 Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) document titled Canadian Coding Standards, for instance, provides several such examples:

“A patient presented at 20 weeks gestation, requesting a therapeutic abortion. She was started on misoprostol, intravenously. The fetus was successfully expelled. A heart beat and respirations were detected at birth.”

“Medical abortion at 23 weeks gestation for fetal anencephaly. Labour induced with intravenous Syntocinon. Fetus was born alive and survived for one hour.”

“A patient presented at 19 weeks gestation for a therapeutic abortion. She was started on misoprostol intravenously. The fetus was expelled. A heartbeat was detected. The fetus expired 7 minutes later.”

These examples serve to demonstrate the range of cases covered by the broad category, “Termination of pregnancy, affecting fetus and newborn.” More particularly, they cast doubt on the suggestion that anything close to 491 viable babies were killed in the course of abortion over the 10-year-period in question.

In the case of the third example, for instance, the fetus was 19 weeks old — below the gestational age of any surviving infant known to medical science. In the case of the second example, the fetus was beset with enencephaly, defined by the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin as, “a lethal birth defect in which the baby is missing a large portion of the brain as well as skull and scalp.” As for the first example, it is described as a “therapeutic abortion” — which means that it was performed as a means to save the mother’s life or protect her health. While the fetus in question may well have been healthy and viable, the state of the mother certainly casts the circumstances of the abortion in a different moral light. (Update: While the term “therapeutic abortion” is commonly defined to mean an abortion intended to protect a mother’s life or health, a reader has pointed out that the CIHI apparently uses the term in a much broader sense, which seems to encompass all forms of induced abortion. Likewise, Statistics Canada has indicated that its own continued use of the term “therapeutic” in abortion-statistic compilations is merely an artifact meant to preserve “historical continuity.” Thus, we can infer little from the circumstances surrounding this listed example.)

Of course, no matter what your bioethical views, it is disturbing to imagine any abortion proceeding to the stage that a breathing fetus has been permitted to exit the woman’s body, thereupon to languish upon an operating-room table. But in most cases, it seems, this relatively rare spectacle arises as a result of medical interventions that many Canadians would view as morally defensible. Calling it homicide is therefore a stretch.

But all those caveats having been said, should we blame pro-life advocates for taking any avenue they can to advance their cause — even a long shot such as this one?

The fact is that Canada is the only nation in the Western world without any abortion law. It is perfectly legal in Canada to have or perform an abortion — for any reason, or no reason at all — at 20, 25, 30 or 35 weeks gestation. This is a disturbing state of affairs. Yet for some reason, most Canadian politicians and public figures have been intimidated into silence, lest we reawaken a “divisive” debate. Even our own nominally “conservative” Prime Minister apparently wants no part of the issue. And so it is understandable that Messrs. Vellacott, Benoit and Lizon are desperate to find other avenues of political agitation.

Moreover, while the late-term abortions they describe in their letter are rare, it is disturbing that this crucial area of bioethics is not subject to any overarching criminal legislation. And so the only oversight we have comes courtesy of obscure StatsCan reports and medical codebooks.

That is not how an otherwise mature and humane country such as Canada should deal with such a fundamentally important moral issue. However lurid their tactic, Messrs. Vellacott, Benoit and Lizon at least have the courage to tackle an issue that almost all of their colleagues in Ottawa would prefer to leave stillborn.

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